Some time ago, I got a great burger in a HelloFresh kit so I’ve been more prone to order burger kits than I might otherwise had. Or I was, until I discovered that what makes a burger great is really the percentage of fat in the meat. Trying to be healthy, I had in the past used low-fat ground beef to make burgers. After the HelloFresh experience, I got some 27% fat ground beef from Harris Ranch, and the difference is amazing. So if I want to make a great burger now, I can just buy the beef rather than rely on a meal kit.
This week, just like last, I actually used the ground beef that came in this kit to make conventional burgers early in the week, when I didn’t feel like making the sweet potatoes. Then, on Sunday, I prepared this kit for lunch, using my own beef, and grilling the burgers outside. All in all, I couldn’t distinguish between the flavor/juiciness of the two different ground beefs, though grilling the burgers did give them an additional “grilled” flavor (probably due to my not cleaning the grill as well as I should have).
I was pleasantly surprised at how good these burgers were. The “dijonaise” which is just a mixture of mayo, Dijon mustard, chopped garlic and chopped cornichon pickles, was very tasty. I didn’t even miss the cheese. That said, 4 oz of ground beef for a burger is not very much – most meal kits give you 5 oz of meat per person, even when you add half a sweet potato.
Even though I enjoyed this kit, I don’t see much point in getting it versus buying the ingredients myself. Still, as I paid only $6.30 for the kit, with a welcome promo, I’m not really complaining.
I decided to get this kit after really enjoying the last Hello Fresh burgers I got. They were definitely better than the ones I made myself. It occurred to me after I order this kit, however, that my burgers may not be as good because I usually use low fat ground beef. I tried making them with 27% fat ground beef and it was a completely different story – they were delicious!
And t
his is a good thing because I ended up using my own ground beef to make this recipe – I had used the one from the kit earlier in the week to make plain burgers, and yes, the meat was great. Really, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two.
These burgers were also very tasty – though the tex-mex spice sort of overwhelmed the meat. I particularly liked the tomato-cilantro salsa. It gave the right counter of freshness to the spiciness of the “crema,” but it was hard to keep on the burger, it just kept sliding off!
I also ended up using my potatoes – having made the ones from the kit previously – and the addition of the tex-mex spice worked very well on these.
All in all, it was a very satisfying lunch, but really, one you don’t need a kit to make it. Still, I paid a tad over $11 for this kit with a “welcome back promo”, so I’m not complaining. I would if I’d paid the $20 standard price.
I made this kit for my vegan daughter tonight and she was relatively pleased with it. She thought it was tasty enough, though she was sort of dumbfounded by the tostadas – she didn’t get them at all. Still, she found them tasty and 3 tostadas were more than enough.
That said, I did make some modifications to the kit. First, I omitted the cheese, to make the tostadas vegan. Second, my daughter doesn’t like peppers (I hadn’t paid attention to what actually came with the kit), so I substituted them with chopped tomato. Of course, making substitutions sort of defeats the purpose of the kit.
Making the dish was relatively simple, but it required using the oven to saute the zucchini and toast the tortillas/tostadas. As summer comes, I want to avoid using the oven.
I paid $6.30 for this kit ($3.15 per serving), using a promo. It’s probably how much it would cost me to buy the ingredients myself. The kit did require me to use my own vinegar.
What a complete waste of calories! Seriously, if you are going to eat all that pasta and all that cheese, make it worth it! Alas, despite the presence of two cheeses, this dish is very, very mild. You can barely taste the cheese – it would seem mascarpone cheese completely dilutes the flavor of Parmesan.
And as if 1,000 calories and over 50 grams of fat for a pretty “blah” dish wasn’t bad enough, I was hungry again a few hours after eating this!
On the plus side, this was easy to make. And the broccoli was fresh and tasty. But there was just no point to this meal.
I paid a tad over $6 for this kit, or $3 per serving with a promo.
This kit for Cheesy Smothered Mushroom Chicken with Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Carrots provided another good-but-not-great meal from Hello Fresh. My husband enjoyed it, but wasn’t wowed. I see no great reason why to make it again, and none of the components were good enough that they merit sharing the recipe.
The ingredients were fine, but even though Hello Fresh has increased their prices (by $1), they don’t match the quality of those sent by Blue Apron. I got chicken stock instead of demi glace and sour cream instead of creme fraiche.
All in all, this meal was what I paid for, $11 for the kit ($5.65 pp), with a “welcome back” promo I got in the mail. I still have a couple of codes for free boxes of HelloFresh if someone wants them.
I made this kit of Hoisin-Glazed Meatballs with Green Beans tonight for my husband and I, as my non-vegan daughter wasn’t even willing to try it. As you can see, I didn’t make the rice. I had spent the day making a rice dish for my vegan daughter, so I figured if we wanted rice, we could have some of that.
The meatballs were pretty good, they were sweet but not overwhelmingly so. I enjoyed them. The green beans were pedestrian. The whole meal was quick to put together – though it did necessitate using the oven, something which I’m trying to avoid now that the spring heat has hit us.
The one failure is that the lime that Hello Fresh sent was, seemingly, pretty old because it had no juice whatsoever. Let me repeat that, no juice at all. It was as dry as Death Valley.
I paid a tad over $11 for this kit ($5.65 pp), with a “welcome back” promo I got in the mail. For that price, I was happy.
Martha & Marley Spoon is one of four mid-priced meal kit companies out there (the others are Hello Fresh, Blue Apron and Home Chef) and so far, the one I’ve been least impressed with. “Martha” refers to Martha Stewart, with whom Marley Spoon struck a partnership in 2016. Supposedly she has some influence on their offerings.
I only got two meal kits, but both were somewhat disappointing. Still, two is a small sample and I may try more if I get any “come back” discounts on the mail.
The Plans
Martha & Marley Spoon offers plans for 2 or 4 people, and you can choose among 2, 3 or 4 meal kits a week. Kits cost between $8.20 and $12 per serving, depending on how much you order. The typical 3-meal kits with 2-servings each plan costs $61.50 a week, or $21/kit – $10.50/serving. Shipping is free in all plans.
The Food
Marley Spoon offers 20 recipes a week, including 6 vegetarian ones. Vegans, however, are out of luck but there are at least 3 gluten-free options every week. The food seems to be modern American, with some ethnic accents. They seem to specialize in relatively safe recipes with broad appeal, including kid friendly offerings. Still, most of the recipes did not look particularly interesting or exciting to me.
While recipes are relatively quick and easy to make, they call for some kitchen equipment that not everyone has at home, in my case, kitchen sears. Problematically, they don’t provide alternatives to that equipment.
The ingredients tend to be rather simple and not particularly exotic, and some are inadequate for the recipes. For example, the canned tomatoes I got were whole and asked me to dice them, when they could have just as easily provided diced tomatoes. Both of my dishes included baby spinach, but in both cases all the spinach did is provide an unpleasant bitter flavor to the dish.
Most of the food was fresh, but I did receive a bruised red pepper – still, it remained fairly firm until the end of the week, when I cooked it.
My biggest beef is that the kits did not include all the ingredients necessary to make the meal. None of the meal kits include oil, salt or pepper, and Hello Fresh irked me by not including butter, but Martha & Marley Spoon went a step further to not include balsamic vinegar – in a dish for which it was essential. To me this is a big fail.
My final complaint about Martha & Marley Spoon is that the portions were smaller than I wished.
The Packaging
Martha & Marley Spoon is a bit better than its competitors as far as packaging goes. While the freezer packs need to be thrown in the garbage, the lining of the box is recyclable – unfortunately, there was no mention of this on either the lining or the literature that came with the box, I had to look it up on their website.
Each kit arrives in a separate paper bag, which I prefer to plastic. I usually put the trimmings from the vegetables in these bags for curbside composting. The meats, as with other kits, were between two freezer packs and they arrived quite cold.
I paid only $18 for this box ($9 per kit or $4.50 a serving), using a promo I found online, and for that price the meals were a steal. At more than twice the price, I’d be pretty disappointed.
This was my second Marley Spoon’s dish and, most likely, my last one. It was perfectly fine as a dish, and I thought the presentation was quite attractive, but it wasn’t special enough to justify the issues I had with it.
First, the steak. It wasn’t particularly great quality – it was sirloin, after all -, and the two steaks were of significantly different thickness, which means that cooking them both together resulted in one more done than the other. While the tamari sauce (recipe below) added a very good flavor, the steaks were not particularly tender.
The farro/red pepper stir-fry was good – or would have been, had I not added the spinach. Once again, it provided an unappetizing bitter taste to the dish.
The portion was also on the small side – I was left hungry after eating it.
Even more vexing was the fact that the kit didn’t include all the ingredients I needed to make the meal. It asked that I provide my own balsamic vinegar. Fortunately, I had some – but the whole dish would have been a fail if I didn’t. To be fair, Marley Spoon did mention in the instructions online that dark balsamic vinegar was needed, but I shouldn’t have to look carefully at every recipe to see what ingredients I have to provide. They really should send everything you need other than oil, salt and pepper (other kits do).
In all, it was a nice meal but frustrating.
Tamari Glaze
1/4 cup tamari soy sauce
3 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp sugar
In a small bowl, mix all ingredients together until the sugar dissolves. Use to glaze meat or as a sauce.
I have been meaning to try Martha & Marley Spoon for a while, but I struggled to find, among their offerings, dishes that I really wanted to try. I suspect that part of the problem is the photography they use on their site makes the dishes look wash out and not particularly exciting . We eat with our eyes, after all. But their offerings seem mostly pedestrian.
In any case, I chose this kit for Stewed Chicken Drumsticks with Orzo & Olive-Parsley Relish because it was something I thought my daughter would eat and because I was intrigued by the idea of making stew in less than an hour. I was disappointed by the results.
The dish itself was relatively easy to make, though I was disappointed than rather than sending a can of diced tomatoes, they sent a can of whole ones and then asked me to cut them with kitchen shears – which I don’t actually own. I transferred them to a bowl and cut them with a knife, but that should not have been a required step.
The main issue, however, was the results of the dish. The chicken, having been cooked at quite high temperatures, was not as tender as it should have been – and given that it was stewed for a relatively short amount of time, the flavors of the sauce had not been absorbed beyond the surface. The sauce itself was unbalanced – a bit too bitter from the spinach – and lacked seasoning. Some more garlic and oregano would have done wonders. The relish added acidity, but I’m not sure the dish needed it.
In all, it was an edible dish, but not at all exciting and I wouldn’t order it again.
While the ingredients looked fresh when the kit arrived in Monday, by Wednesday night – when I cooked it – the spinach and the parsley were both losing its crispiness, even though I stored them in the fridge.
I paid $9 for this kit ($4.50 pp) using a promo code – the regular price is about $21.
Let me be honest. If Blue Apron had been the first meal kit company I had tried, chances are I would give it a more enthusiastic review. That’s because my expectations for meal kits when I started were very low. But having tried most of the meal kit companies out there, my expectations have risen considerably. Blue Apron delivered, but not enough to compel me to stay subscribed. It’s an OK choice, but not in my top three – though I probably liked it best in this price category. Which is just as well as, unlike other meal kit companies, they haven’t been begging me to come back with enticing promos. 🙂
The Plans
Blue Apron offers plans for two and four servings. You can order either two or three meal 2-serving meal kits per week. Two will cost you $48 a week ($24 per kit, $12 pp) and three will cost $60 a week ($20 per kit, $10 pp). The 4-serving kits cost $72 for 2 kits ($9 pp), $96 for 3 ($8 pp) or $120 for 4 ($7.50 pp).
In addition to regular plans they have a Weight Watchers “freestyle” plan and a vegetarian plan, both only available for 2 servings, and costing the same as the regular plan.
The Food
Blue Apron offers 8 recipes a week, including 3 vegetarian ones – some of which can be turned into vegan. The recipes are mostly modern American food, which incorporates elements from other cuisines. I liked that they included ingredients that are not necessarily in my pantry – and that they didn’t skimp in the quality. I got ghee, rather than having to use my own butter, for instance, and creme fraiche instead of sour cream. Blue Apron doesn’t seem to offer steak, so perhaps that’s how they save money.
The ingredients were high quality and they came and stayed fresh (except for some wobbly carrots). The recipes were easy to put together.
The Packaging
Like other meal kits, Blue Apron comes in a recyclable cardboard box. The ingredients were individually wrapped, but otherwise tossed together inside the box. There were small bags with “knick knacks” for each recipe, however. Still, I prefer to have all the ingredients for each recipe in their own bag, so I can easily take them out of refrigerator rather than having to search for them.
I was happy that I was able to drain the freezer packs – once defrosted – in the sink rather than have to throw them in the garbage. They were a thick gel even when defrosted, but it thinned with hot water. The lining of the box, however, wasn’t recyclable or compostable.
Liked the schnitzel, actually loved the kale. Really.
All in all, I had fun cooking these meals and the results were perfectly fine. Blue Apron is priced the same as HelloFresh and HomeChef, and I feel it offers a superior experience to the other two. Cancelling was easy – but that has been true of all the meal kits I’ve ordered.
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